The 1993 movie directed by Kaige Chen, Farewell My Concubine, addresses the Chinese political issues during the war against Japan via interpersonal issues of an opera troupe of young male actors. The movie is as long as it is engaging. With two orphan boys who are raised to act in an Opera for their entire lives, dedication obtains a whole new meaning. Dieyi's training to act as a woman and to reflect femininity in his whole life increases the dissension that is observed within the film as well as its connections to the politics of China. The use of ghastly sound effects, close-up cinematographic techniques, and military involvement combine together in this movie to create a devastatingly dramatic experience.
At the beginning of Farewell My Concubine, two male actors walk towards the camera filming them and into a dark arena. They are welcomed by a faceless voice in the shadows and are given a stage light to perform. Once the stage light appears, the scene changes into a sepia-toned showcase of Douzi’s childhood and his introduction to the young opera troupe of Beijing. Douzi, a young male with a prostitute for a mother has quite an unfortunate upbringing. This is not revealed until his mother goes to see the master of the opera troupe to get her son enrolled.
While Douzi’s mother visits the troupe, the punishments that the kids go through by the hands of their masters are exhibited callously. The kids are beaten with the sides of swords and made to perform physically strenuous tasks. The main master Guan says that, they are not human beings, if they do not perform in the opera and that cliques are forbidden in the troupe. When the mother finally gets to speak with Master Guan, he informs her that her son will not b...
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...udience of Dieyi’s opera as well as Dieyi himself. His aforementioned fate as a concubine leads him to accept singing for the Japanese, and this is seen as traitorous to the Chinese government. The Japanese never beat him and it furthered his performance for them. It shed light on his previous punishments by Master Guan and how he did not want to perform at first. It seems as if the director of the movie, wanted to indirectly show how the treatment of people in China by the Japanese was much better than that of the Old Society.
The movie ends during the time of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 established by the Communist People’s Liberation Army. In the last chapters, members of the Old Society betray each other after the New Society takes over. Dieyi commits to his fate and kills himself with the concubine sword, which determines the fall of the Old Society.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
Romiette Cappelle is a sixteen-year-old African-American girl. She has been having the same nightmares for weeks. In the dream Romi is drowning, the water burns and she hears a male voice coaxing her. Romiette loves to read, run, and work with her mother. Julio Montague is a sixteen-year-old Mexican American who loves to swim and play the harp. Romi and Julio friendship begins when they discover they attend the same high school. They have a few things in common, such as the love for mandolins, music, and family. Their friendship starts to blossom into more, but the devil dogs, a gang at their high school doesn’t want them together. The gang threatens and continues to bother Romi and Julio. With the help of Destiny and Ben, their best friends,
Ultimately, The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan Spence is a timeless, educational, historical novel. Spence purpose to enlighten the reader of the Chinese culture, tradition and its land were met through the use of sources, like the Local History of T'an-ch'eng, the scholar-official Huang Liu-hung's handbook and stories of the writer P'u Sung-Ling. The intriguing structure of The Death of Woman Wang will captivate any reader's attention.
In every story, there is a protagonist and an antagonist, good and evil, love and hatred, one the antithesis of the other. To preserve children’s innocence, literature usually emphasizes on the notion that love is insurmountable and that it is the most beautiful and powerful force the world knows of, yet Gen’s and Carmen’s love, ever glorious, never prevails. They each have dreams of a future together, “he takes Carmen’s hand and leads her out the gate at the end of the front walkway… together they… simply walk out into the capital city of the host country. Nobody knows to stop them. They are not famous and nobody cares. They go to an airport and find a flight back to Japan and they live there, together, happily and forever” in which their love is the only matter that holds significance (261). The china
Most films captivate the audience’s interest through the main character. This film did just that. Through the main character Li Cunxin, I was able to notice the amount of hard work and dedication which lead Li to become a famous ballet dancer known worldwide. The film, based on the autobiography by Li Cunxin, “Mao’s Last Dancer” directed by Bruce Beresford is about a Chinese boy named Li Cunxin who’s born into a large family of 6 boys. At the age of eleven, Li got chosen from a poverty-stricken Chinese village by Madam Mao’s cultural representatives to leave his family and study ballet in Beijing. This film focussed on his eventual departure from China to U.S.A after being selected by a world leading choreographer, Ben Stevenson including the
To conclude, the Rape of Nanking was a terrifying event, which has, throughout the impact of the Japanese government and the fear of the people who survived, happened to be designed to disappear with time. History textbooks go over the subject along with the individuals whose reality that was; have already been made into a terrified silence. This story nevertheless, must be shared. Three hundred thousand Japanese men and women were brutally raped and killed over a long amount of time, a period where there was clearly no escape. Iris Chang goes back and reveals the incidents and the reasons behind the concealing, in such a way that simply cannot be forgotten about.
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
Chinatown builds upon the film noir tradition of exploiting expanding social taboos. Polanski added an entirely new dimension to classic film noir by linking up its darkness with the paranoid and depressed mood of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, thereby extending the noir sense of corruption beyond the mean urban streets and to high governmental and privileged economic places. Chinatown may be set in 1930’s L.A., but it embodies the 1970’s. The film stands as an indictment of both capitalism and patriarchy going out of control. It implies that we are powerless in the face of this evil corruption and abusive power that is capable of anything, including incest: one of the most horrible breaches of human decency and social morality imaginable.
During December of 1937, the ancient city of Nanking was invaded by the Japanese army, who would eventually go on to murder and rape innocent civilians and bring the death toll to surpass that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. What happened there is re-told through three perspectives, that of the soldiers who performed the attack, of the civilians who suffered and survived, and finally of the select group of Europeans and Americans who fought to save over 300,000 people from this atrocity. One such hero is John Rabe, a Nazi, who Iris Chang goes so far as to refer to as the “Oskar Schindler of China”. He, along with many others, tirelessly worked to save these people and to reveal the true horrors. Through his and other accounts, the afflictions that the people of Nanking endured are exposed and brought to the publics’ attention.
Mao’s Last Dancer, directed by Bruce Beresford, is driven by Li’s experiences in the clash between American and Chinese culture and the journey to discovering his own identity. Through Li’s eyes this film shows us his search for identity which can sometimes be helped or hindered by the difference in cultures. These themes are shown during the film through the use of Symbolic, Written, Audio and Technical conventions (SWAT).
The characters are a crucial element in developing the narrative of a film. The characters in Breathless do not act the way one expects those of Hollywood cinema to act. The woman who distracts the police officer in the opening scene seems as if she may be important, but is in fact never seen again. This happens again in a subsequent ...
The author starts the book by Revolution and disintegration incident that happened in 1911, where the British and Japanese fought over control of China. Chinese prisoners were being led away for execution during the revolution where they would be beheaded with swords, which the author states is very popular. It mentions the presidency of Sun Yatsen and his reforms which he could not control that he made himself in 1912. Around this time, “warlords” took over China controlling it and ruining its economy. The author moves on to war that involved China and its neighbors. It describes the Communist Revolution and Mao Zedong, an the “Autumn Harvest.” The author then relates to Mao’s victory in 1945-1949 and the Japanese forces pulling out.
...hut the child out of their lives. Rather than dealing with the mistake or misfortune as a parent should do and stand by their child’s side, both parents ran away and tried to hide from the problem. The feelings of each character were completely forgotten and lost. Each were treated as some sort of object that could be thrown away and replaced. And ultimately, the outcomes in their lives reflected their poor parenting. The choices they made unfortunately came from the lack of skills they were taught when they were young and impressionable. Neither character knows what it is like to be a part of a loving family because they were both used as objects for money or fame. Sadly, the lack of parenting led to the demise of each and we are reminded, from over a hundred years ago as well as today, that successful parenting today will lead to successful adults for the future.
At the center of Japanese and Chinese politics and gender roles lies the teachings of Confucius. The five relationships (五倫） of Confucius permeated the lives of all within the Heian and Tang societies.4 However, the focus here will be on the lives of the courtesans. The Genji Monogatari provides us with an unrivalled look into the inner-workings of Confucianism and court life in the Heian period. Song Geng, in his discourse on power and masculinity in Ch...
...the Chinese people wanted – though, this could have been to keep her own position. Even if that is the case, she could have done what they did not want and keep her position using more violence than she actually used.